Dodgers’ Drama Has Sad Ending

One year ago last Saturday, the Dodgers traded Mike Piazza. No matter what you might hear today about refurbishing the existing stadium or building a new one, that was the day we all knew the walls that Peter O’Malley had so carefully constructed were coming down.

It is not the purpose here, however, to revisit an astonishingly rash and short-sighted deal that sent away perhaps only the second Hall of Famer produced by the Dodgers’ farm system since they’ve been in Los Angeles and a player whose impact on the franchise before he finished might have equaled that of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.

No, I’m not going to comment on that.

As with any demolition, the fascination with the explosion lingers until the rebuilding begins.

In this case, the Dodgers started immediately with players acquired in the deal with the Florida Marlins, Gary Sheffield, Bobby Bonilla, Charles Johnson and Jim Eisenreich. Other trades brought them Jeff Shaw, Todd Hundley, Carlos Perez and Mark Grudzielanek. They added Kevin Brown, Devon White and Alan Mills through free agency. Adrian Beltre arrived from Albuquerque.

After all that, what have we got?

When last season ended, the Dodgers were four games over .500. When Thursday began, the Dodgers were three games over .500.

IT’S THE SAME TEAM!

What did we expect? I don’t know about you, but, from talking to General Manager Kevin Malone and some of the players during the winter, the least I expected was a team that would run away with the National League West, battle the almost equally formidable Atlanta Braves for the pennant and advance in four or five games to meet the New York Yankees in a World Series to end the millennium, if the millennium weren’t ending a year later.

Right now, the Dodgers would be content to catch the Giants and Diamondbacks.

I know it’s only May. Eric Karros reminded us of that last week in comments that probably were misinterpreted. Let’s hope so because, “It’s only May,” isn’t much as battle cries go. Imagine how history might have been changed if John Paul Jones instead of saying, “I have not yet begun to fight!” had said, “It’s only May.”

While choosing not to make an issue of Karros’ seeming lack of urgency, Malone seconded Sheffield’s suggestion that the Dodgers are lackadaisical.

But Malone said that it’s unfair to expect the new management to change in six weeks an attitude that has prevailed in the Dodger clubhouse for 10 years.

If that sounds like a slap at the old management, it was. (Malone’s predecessor, Fred Claire, said Thursday that he had noted it, but chose not to comment except to say that he wishes the Dodgers well.)

It also could be interpreted as a slap at players such as Karros, Raul Mondesi, Ismael Valdes, Darren Dreifort, Chan Ho Park, Antonio Osuna and Todd Hollandsworth, who were Dodgers during varying portions of those 10 years, and Eric Young and Jose Vizcaino, who were raised in the Dodger farm system, left and came back.

Considering the Dodgers’ 0-for-the-’90s postseason record, Malone could be onto something. It’s not exactly a new theory.

Another one that began to develop in the last couple of seasons was that the Dodgers simply were not as good as they had been perceived. Having five rookies of the year, we now know, is not the same as having five MVPs or even five all-stars.

But whether the problem was lack of talent or lack of inspiration, Malone, declaring himself the new sheriff in town, was pretty certain he had corrected it by bringing in players such as Hundley, White and Brown and a manager such as Davey Johnson. The Dodgers, he boasted, would be the closest thing the National League has to offer to the Yankees, complete with a new New York attitude.

So far, as even Malone has been forced to admit, they look a lot like the old Dodgers.

They have a staff ace in Brown, but he merely replaces the ace they had in Ramon Martinez. They have a closer in Shaw, but they don’t have reliable middle relief. They have a big hitter in Sheffield, but they don’t have a bigger hitter in Piazza.

As for attitude, the scouts who sit in the boxes with the speed guns say they seldom see the Dodgers look interested for an entire game. Too often, they, like their fans, are somewhere else by the seventh inning.

Hundley might still help in that area, but he hasn’t had enough of a presence on the field to have one in the clubhouse. Not yet recovered from elbow surgery, he had thrown out only four of 33 runners trying to steal going into Thursday night’s game.

The Dodgers don’t want us to read too much into their decision this week to call up their catcher of the future, Angel Pena, from Albuquerque, but sometimes two and two do equal four.

Brown is doing the job he was hired to do on the mound, having most recently stopped the Dodgers’ three-game losing streak with his victory over Houston on Wednesday night. But if his example was supposed to also make the other Dodger starters more intense, we have yet to notice a difference in any of them except Valdes. If anything, Park and Perez seem less focused.

You also have to wonder about Malone as sheriff.

He certainly didn’t seem eager to get to the bottom of that alleged escapade involving Perez a couple of weeks ago in Montreal.

Maybe we’ve got Perez all wrong. Maybe we’ve got all of the Dodgers wrong. Maybe they’re about to get their heads into the game and start playing above them. Maybe they’re about to leave the Giants and Diamondbacks in their dust.

It’s only May.

Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.